A partial design process

This month will be a brief post focusing on a gameplay question and how I have gone about coming up with an answer.

Setup and initial question

The game involves 4 teams of 4 players fighting to eliminate the other teams bases. The shape of the map is based around a central area surrounded by a circle of 8 areas. Those 8 areas are split between team starting areas and neutral areas alternating between those 2 types. As we want to discourage a specific tactic where a team goes very defensive in their starting area, we are looking to implement map elements that encourage teams to leave their base. There are more than one element we have added to push a more expansive playstyle, but the one I touch upon today is very much based around one of the design pillars being the risk/reward play we want to encourage.

First draft

Since we want teams to not be too defensive, but also potentially engage more than one enemy team at a time, the focus was on the central area of the map. I looked through what the objective of the game was (destroy the enemy bases) while also wanting to still encourage teamplay. This led me to decide on suggesting a map wide blast that is going to kill every player not inside their starting base, while also damaging all bases except the one belonging to the team activating it. Upon activating a console in the middle area, a map wide alert will go off and alert all players and provide an active countdown timer showing them their window for stopping the blast.

Second Draft, and a potential third.

The idea needed further tuning. I still wanted to push the teamplay aspect so I added the more risky requirement of needing two players from the same team to activate the console. Since the teams are 4 players each, a team going for this plan now has to get at least 2 players to the center console, leaving them to only have 2 defenders at their base. For initial tests, the deactivation will probably be limited to only 1 from an opposing team needing to get to the console, but I would love to test how it changes the players approach if it requires two players to deactivate too, but those 2 players don’t have to be playing on a team together, as long as they’re both on opposing teams to the one that activated the console.

See ya next month. :)